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Salad Dressing (T salt t mustard t butter Cook)
4 eggs 1/2 C sugar Scant 3/4 C vinegar Juice 2 lemons.
1 t salt 1 t mustard 1 t butter Cook in double boiler. Add ½ C cream, whipped, when ready to use. Mrs. George Wright.
What was printed here is only part of the recipe: a boiled (cooked) salad dressing normally needs eggs, an acid and a liquid, and none of those appear except the cream folded in at the end. Treat the page as a record of Mrs. Wright's proportions for the seasoning rather than a complete working formula.
- T and tA capital T commonly stands for tablespoon and a lower-case t for teaspoon in cookbooks of this kind. The title of the entry preserves the original abbreviations; the body as set gives all three as teaspoons.
- What is missingA cooked dressing of this type is thickened with beaten egg or egg yolk and soured with vinegar or lemon juice, usually with a little sugar and sometimes a spoonful of flour. Without those, salt, mustard and butter cooked alone will not thicken into anything. Use a current boiled-dressing recipe and borrow these seasonings if you want her flavour.
- MustardThis most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar.
- The double boilerThe point of it is that an egg-thickened dressing curdles over direct heat. Water in the lower pan should stay at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and the mixture wants constant stirring until it coats the spoon.
- Cream'Cream' here means heavy or whipping cream. Whip it to soft peaks and fold it in only after the cooked base has cooled, or it will slacken and weep.
- Serving and keepingHalf a cup of cream whips up to roughly a cup; how much dressing that makes in total depends on the size of the missing base. Once the cream is in it will not hold; dress the salad and serve.
Boiled dressing was the standard American salad sauce before bottled mayonnaise became cheap and universal in the 1910s and 20s. It was cooked rather than emulsified cold because it used far less oil than mayonnaise and forgave the cook a broken egg. Dry mustard, salt and butter over hot water, finished with whipped cream just before the meal, is what the page gives for the sweet-sour dressing served over shredded cabbage, head lettuce or canned fruit, though egg and acid are missing from the list. The heavy abbreviation and the missing ingredients here are common in community cookbooks. The attribution to Mrs. George Wright, by her husband's name, is the standard form in such books and is often the only trace left of the cook.